A cyclist makes her way across Main Street from Hill Avenue using bike lanes leading to and from the Santa Fe Trail.

At 6 this evening a handful of Dallas City Council members and other cycling advocates will meet at Main Street Garden for a short bike ride to Dallas City Hall, where they’ll hold The Official First Meeting of the Dallas Bicycle Task Force. Among those scheduled to attend: council members Philip Kingston, Scott Griggs, Adam Medrano and Lee Kleinman; members of the Bike Friendlies around town; and reps from Downtown Dallas Inc.

The task force was the council members’ idea, born out of frustration with the slow roll-out of the 2011 Dallas Bike Plan, which, after many public hearings, demanded “wide-spread use of bicycles as an accepted and practical form of transportation, recreation and exercise” while calling for “a safe, efficient, connected bikeway system for all of Dallas, used by people of all ages and abilities, including a range of standardized onstreet and off-street bicycle facilities that are sensitive to their land use and transportation context.” Save for some shared bike lanes (including, especially, the so-called Centralink downtown) and the promise of buffered cycle tracks here and there, Dallas has a long, long way to go, in part because the city continues to wrestle with the new urbanists’ vision of a walkable-bikeable core and what one city official calls “the stark reality that we’re a commuter city” that’s not helped by DART’s “inconvenient” connection points.

Nathan Hunsinger/Staff photographer

John Crawford, the CEO of Downtown Dallas Inc. (which wants downtown bike-sharing), and Mayor Mike Rawlings in front of Dallas City Hall in the fall of 2012

“I want to accomplish implementation of the bike master plan,” says Kingston. “We want more on-street bike facilities, as well as better trail connections. Those are the big deals right now in terms of improving bikeability. The good news about my job is I don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room. These are some serious bike advocates involved.”

Today’s meeting is the second, following last week’s kick-off and Patrick “Car-Free” Kennedy’s delivering to the city what he calls a “quick feasibility study” concerning bike-sharing — which, come May-ish, will be limited to Fair Park. Downtown and Uptown advocacy organizations want to see bike-sharing in their parts of the city within the year, and Kennedy’s look-see provides those groups, as well as Dallas City Hall, with “a rough idea about ridership, revenue and funding gap so that we can fund-raise,” says the man behind the Interstate 345 tear-down movement.

Which brings us to the other big thing Kingston wants the task force to get done: snuff out Dallas’ helmet law. Says Kingston, and just about every other cycling advocate, the helmet ordinance — and Dallas is the only city in the state to have one mandating that riders of all ages wear one — is an impediment to bike-sharing, because of cost (they’re expensive to replace) and health concerns (who wants to share a helmet?), among other things. Which is why they don’t have them, say, in Manhattan.

“For us, bike-sharing is little complicated because we do have the helmet law,” says Keith Manoy, the senior transportation planner at Dallas City Hall tasked with finding room on Dallas’ streets for the bike plan. “When we roll out this program we have to have to account for bike helmet, and sourcing for that is a little more difficult. We’re writing the [request for proposals] so we can have a vendor who provides the helmets and cycles, and the financing to do this is our challenge.”

“I think the helmet ordinance is not long for this world, which will free us up to do actual bike share and not the fake thing we’re doing at Fair Park,” says Kingston. “That’s still probably a year away. I talked to Jared White [currently in charge of bike plan implementation] and DDI and Uptown Dallas Inc., and a year’s about as fast as they can do it.”

Eventually, all of this will make its way to council committees and the full council itself. But, says Kingston, the city’s had years to move the bike plan off the drawing board and onto the streets, and it hasn’t made much progress. Why not? Well, as the city’s former bike coordinator Max Kalhammer said while on his way out the door last June, “I think there’s a little bit of disparity between the willingness of people to ride and how much advocacy there is … and how much support there is now at the city.”

The city has yet to officially replace Kalhammer, but Manoy says a new bike coordinator will likely be in place by month’s end. Nothing has been announced pending the completion of some new-hire paperwork.

“But it’s always been the intention of the city staff to have a bicycle advocacy committee, and we look forward to working with task force,” says Manoy. “Our new bike coordinator should be on staff shortly, and she’ll hit the ground running and will work with the committee. Unfortunately we’re a small staff, and we need this position to be a liaison with the committee. Getting this person on board will make that easier. But we are trying to get as much infrastructure on the street and make accommodations for those leisure riders who need to feel safe on the streets.”

“I am living in absolute terror that we are in a cycle of austerity, that our budgets will be crushed by our infrastructure needs for the next five to seven years, and that the next bond package will be 100 percent boring,” says Kingston. “I have spent the last week really fretting about this and talking to staffers about what the ideas are, and there are no easy solutions.”

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